1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to providing communications through a social networking system that are configured to enable a user to complete a purchase of a product or service after a dialog between the user and a merchant or other entity.
2. Introduction
This application addresses a number of issues related to simplifying and managing on-line purchases of products and navigation between sites on the Internet. This application will introduce a number of issues and focus on one aspect of the disclosure related to dialogs that are used to help complete a purchase or finalize a transaction. Other issues addressed herein and covered in related patent applications are also discussed. This introduction may include a discussion of novel features and should not be considered as admitting that any concept discussed in this section is prior art.
The first issue addressed herein is that in the context of one-click purchasing options, there can be an issue with respect to how does one resolve concerns of a potential buyer. Sometimes the user may desire to purchase a product but there might be parameters that still need to be chosen. With clothes it might be size or color. With electronics it might be an amount of memory or a color. In some cases there may be some bad reviews about a product or articles that reflect poorly on a merchant. The buyer may have questions they desire answers to prior to finalizing a purchase. The buyer concern can be about anything related to the product, service, merchant or any other topic. Thus, it would be desirous to enable an approach of transitioning to a dialog about the product to resolve those concerns and finalizing the parameters and then efficiently confirming the payment. The claims in the present case address this issue.
Another issue addressed herein is how to easily transition a user from a search engine or browser site to a destination site. One effort to make this transition was provided by the omnikey feature of Safari. Using the omnikey extension, Safari users could type in an indicator of what alternate site they wanted to use for processing the input. For example, in an input field, the user would type “amazon headphones” which would instruct the algorithm processing the input to search amazon.com for “headphones” and return the result. The problem with this approach is that it is likely easier to click on an amazon tab and type “headphones” in the Amazon search field than it is to type “amazon” at the beginning of the search. Further, to tell the search engine that the user is not wanting to transition to amazon, the user would have to begin the search with an exclamation point “!” which forces regular searchers. Thus, using such a feature, where most user input is likely involving regular searches according to the default search engine, might require the user to often begin searches with “!”. Thus, this effort at transitioning users to other sites still has its problems.
The second issue relates to the long-felt problem of requiring users to enter in payment data such as credit card information and a user address when making a purchase. Some sites like Amazon.com provide a “one-click” purchasing option but those simplifications are only available in the controlled Amazon.com environment. For all the other merchants, users much inter in their payment data which is cumbersome. Mobile users outside of Amazon.com still need to include and enter in much information which reduces the number of conversions when making purchases on line either on the desktop or mobile devices.
The present disclosure also addresses an issue in the art that arises through the use of buy buttons on disparate platforms. None of this introduction is meant to characterize “prior art” as the present application claims priority to applications discloses various implementations of buy buttons on search engines, social media, and so forth. Thus, none of the discussion in this application should be considered as the applicant admitting any subject matter herein is prior art.
Given the advent of buy buttons available on such sites as google.com, facebook.com, instagram.com, pinterest.com, bing.com, yahoo.com, youtube.com, amazon.com and twitter.com, there is a challenge that arises in terms of tracking purchases. A user may make a purchase of a first product on facebook.com and the next day purchase a second product on google.com. To enable such purchases, the sites like google.com will maintain purchase information like credit card or payment account information, or an interface with PayPal® or Apple Pay will be provided such that purchases can be easily processed. While these buy buttons are expanding, there is no existing mechanism of harmonizing or organizing those purchases such that users can easily manage purchases. The user may forget where they made the purchase and feel frustrated when they cannot manage the purchases or review their purchase history. For closed aggregated merchant sites like www.amazon.com, wherein the purchases are controlled through a single site with multiple merchants making their products available to such a site, the ability to manage the user account and history of purchases is easier.
However, the goal of buy buttons on various sites is the enable purchases in those “micro-moments” when a person might be on facebook or instagram and see something they might want to buy. The benefit of the buy button incorporated into these various traditionally non-merchants sides is to take advantage of the ease of purchasing from sites where people spend time, such as google.com and social media sites. However, as noted above, by presenting the buy options at those locations to take advantage of such micro-moments, makes the follow up management of various purchases more difficult because the purchases are spread across disparate sites that are not coordinated.